I can't drown my demons (they know how to swim)
by Shadows of a Dream
Summary: "It's not as if she's never been alone before. The dark here, though, is more presence than absence. It feels riddled with ghosts – echoes of all the girls she's tried to be, tugging at her robes, whispering questions that remain unanswered, asking for someone to dry their tears or tend their wounds." Or, Rey finds a shell of the Second Death Star underwater; the Force ensues.


**A/N:** _I saw an Ep. VII YouTube video using a song called "Can You Feel My Heart" by "Bring Me the Horizon." A snatch of that song's lyrics became the title of this fic._

 _The plot is inspired by a piece of concept art in the official "Art of the Force Awakens" hardcover book: the film's creators had originally imagined a scene in which the Millennium Falcon went underwater and discovered the Emperor's throne room from the second Death Star, so I ran with that concept on my own terms._

 **I can't drown my demons (they know how to swim)**

 **1.**

Rey can feel her racing pulse, a rapid pitter-patter, like distant rain on a hollow rooftop. The rhythm makes her whole body shiver. The nails of her right hand bite into her palm, but the mechanical fingers of her left are unnaturally still, and little sparks leap between the joints that lie beneath her synthetic skin.

Blue hyperspace surrounds the Millennium Falcon.

"Do you know where you're going?" Finn asks, doubtful.

Rey bites her lip. She's learning to recognize the Force's guidance, and she feels it now – like a cold metal hand at her back, easing her forward step by step. "Wherever it is," she says, subconsciously stopping lightspeed, "that I'm supposed to be."

She expects the chaos of azure around them to give way to infinite stars, but instead, it deepens to brilliant indigo, the Millennium Falcon groaning beneath an unfamiliar ocean's weight. They're underwater, lost from space and time alike. The bottomless deep is all that exists.

Wide-eyed, Finn leans forward in the copilot's seat. "Is this the planet where you trained with Luke Skywalker?"

"No, it isn't."

"Then where are we?"

Rey swallows. _Somewhere better off forgotten._ There is a heavy weight here – like Luke Skywalker's gaze, but colder and harder – more akin to a blaster pistol's mouth at the nape of her neck, close enough for her to kiss it.

"Rey?"

"Keep the Falcon close," she says as she stands. A chest at the back of the cockpit contains her deep water gear (assembled by the ever-faithful Chewbacca,) and she promptly unlocks it, unloading the breathing apparatus. "But do not follow me, Finn, under any circumstances." The air tank tied tightly to her back, she shoves her head into the helmet, her breath fogging the visor as she adjusts the breathing tube. "I'll swim back when I have what I came for."

Rey rises to leave, but a hand catches her arm. She freezes.

Finn's gaze, intent, is steady on hers, the color of dry land above – a safe place to land. "Come back to me, okay?"

Rey arches an eyebrow. "Why wouldn't I?"

"You always expect people to leave," Finn says. "You expect them to pack their bags and never come back. Because it's what you know. Because it would be easier." He grips her arm a little tighter. "So I want you to know, I… It matters to me, that you come back today."

They were reunited only a few days ago – the memory is still shimmering in his eyes. The clumsy collision of limbs. The release of breaths they'd both been holding for months. Questions like _what did I say in the haze of pain meds?_ or _how did you lose your left hand?_ drowned out by the pounding of hearts and the linking of hands as they stood together, indivisible, for the first time in so long.

"That you _came_ back," Finn says. "It matters." And then his arms are thrown around her again – an awkward embrace, interrupted by the jutting angles of the breath mask over her head – but her arms find their way around his body, too, and that's the way they stay, stock-still, suspended in an underwater silence, both their bodies braced like a current is seeking to sweep them away.

Rey thinks she just wasted half her oxygen on a hug. But after years of sand only ever flaying her skin, hands only ever bruising her bones, Jakku's sun only ever searing her eyes… These easy touches, these physical comforts, are new and strange and a little like home. She doesn't want to dwell upon the consequences.

Finn releases her without another word, and she makes her way down the Falcon's corridors. Her hands upraised, she keeps the water at bay, the Force roaring through her like sunlight through glass as Finn opens the exit ramp. Then she leaps headlong into the deep, the water crashing back into place in her wake. She still has no inkling of where they are.

But she knows precisely where she's going.

 **2.**

 _What are you looking for out there, Rey Skywalker?_

Aboard the Millennium Falcon – as Finn closes his eyes, hoping for sleep – a panel of the floor wobbles and rattles. He leaps to his feet, breathing hard. Tells himself it's his imagination. But the moment his rear end returns to the copilot's seat, the floor lurches with such suddenness that he smashes his forehead into the control panel from the shock.

Groaning, Finn makes his way back to the floor panel in question. With one hand on his blaster, he pulls the panel aside.

BB-8 gazes up at him, looking particularly pleased with itself.

"BB-8?" Finn tosses his pistol to the floor. "What are you doing here?"

The droid beeps, noncommittal.

"We've been through this. I don't speak that. What are you –" The droid's lower half spins wildly, attempting in vain to escape from under the floor. "All right," Finn sighs, and lifts it out of the hole. "All right. But you'd better tell me what you're doing here."

Buzzing loudly, BB-8 rolls over to the control panel, then looks back to Finn as if to say, _I need a lift._ Finn rolls his eyes, but he hoists the droid up on one of his shoulders, prompting BB-8 to roll on to a particular lever, which opens a concealed compartment from beside Finn's foot.

Finn kneels down to investigate, but there is only one item in the compartment: a tiny, dark screen, attached to a band like a watch. "Is that what you were looking for?"

BB-8 nods aggressively.

Finn bites his lip, perplexed. Then he taps the screen, and it springs to life with a live positioning system readout. BB-8 beeps so loudly, Finn swears his ears should be bleeding. Then it occurs to him: "Is this a readout of Rey's location?"

BB-8 nods so hard, it looks like his head might spontaneously spring from his body.

Finn smiles despite himself. "And that wavy green line … That's her oxygen level, isn't it? So I'll know if she's in trouble?"

The droid beeps, rolling in an enthusiastic circle around the cockpit.

"BB-8, I don't what we're going to do with you."

The droid freezes and drops its head, beeping mournfully.

Finn laughs. "But I don't know where we'd be without you," he says, giving a thumbs-up.

The droid responds with its trademark blowtorch, and for an instant, Finn feels completely safe. Then the red dot that represents Rey freezes on the screen. _If you've found what you're looking for, Rey Skywalker, what does that mean for you? For me?_

Finn's lungs swell with panic instead of air.

 _For whatever it is we've become?_

 **3.**

The deeper Rey swims, the darker the waters become. The area around the Falcon was clear, sunlight still streaming from above the surface, but now her vision grows smoky. Tentatively, fearing what fantastic beasts might haunt these depths, Rey draws her lightsaber – the only shard of her Master that remains, save for the shrapnel of memory embedded in her chest.

 _Did you really think anyone would stay?_ whispers the quiet voice that kept her company on Jakku, the wordless doubt of a girl so long forgotten. _Least of all, a man who abandoned everyone he ever loved to nurse his bruised idealism back to uncertain health?_

Yet Luke Skywalker's lightsaber splits the dark, like a spirit's scythe, gleaming a ghostly blue against what little deep-water gear Rey is wearing. An overabundance of mechanical parts would only slow her down; a Jedi's truest ally, the Force, is enough to ensure that she doesn't shatter beneath the pressure, so long as she doesn't swim too far down.

A rainbow of fish scuttles closer to the light, then scatters from the heat. Rey's answering laugh is oddly choked by her breath mask, little bubbles twirling towards the surface. The saber's light is a relief, revealing a profound absence of nearby terrors, but instead of allowing it to guide her, Rey tightly shuts her eyes.

 _Living Force, guide me._

It's as if her blood shifts in sync with the ocean. Slowly, like a false reflection shattering, Rey begins to see her surroundings in a brilliant haze, too crisp to be real. And she knows exactly where to go. She spears through the water, eyes still closed, propelled by an invisible current.

Even before she gazes upon her surroundings, she knows that the waters have grown very, very dark. Her open, but there is no change in sight; her hands stretch out, but there is nothing to touch but more water and the cool, slick, palpable black, like she's swimming in tar. She takes a deep breath through her mask, in spite of her limited oxygen supply. _Clear your mind._ That's what Skywalker would say, but her whole body says, _Panic,_ and the only coherent thought she can form is, _Deep breaths, Rey._

 _Deep breaths._

It's not as if she's never been alone before.

The dark here, though, is more presence than absence. It feels riddled with ghosts – echoes of all the girls she's tried to be, tugging at her robes, whispering questions that remain unanswered, asking for someone to dry their tears or tend their wounds. Skywalker said she had the makings of a good listener, but this is the ugly underbelly of that skill: she only accepts discipline from without because she's spent her entire life silencing voices from within.

 _Finn will be gone when you come back,_ a child's voice hisses, close to her ear. _You know that, don't you?_

Rey covers her ears with her hands, but the voice persists.

 _You'll come back to him, because it's what you do. You come back, because you really want to think he'll wait for you._ The ocean is suddenly cold. _But he'll be gone. And he won't come back, because it's what they do. All of them._ A lump lodges in the back of Rey's throat. _I would know. We're the same, after all._ A little giggle floats through the water. _And we've been waiting for such a terribly long time._

"Be quiet!" Rey shouts, knowing full well that she's wasting oxygen. She flails her arms at unseen phantoms, to no avail.

 _But then you'll be alone,_ says the child's voice. It's her own voice, really, or one of them, dormant for so long – buried under titles like Jedi and Resistance, titles like heroine and heritage and _his_. _And I'm still here. I always have been. All you have to do is answer me._

Like lightning, a crack of light splits the water, and for a brilliant instant of purest fear, Rey beholds her cousin's pallid face, suspended in the water like a corpse, but animated like something living and present. In the globes of his pupils, a reflection of Luke Skywalker falls to its knees, then collapses into nothing but a set of ragged robes. A voice screams through the water: _You need a teacher!_

Rey screams before she can remember to hardly breathe, then claps a hand over the breath mask, trying to stifle the torrent of bubbles. This is not a natural place. Like the island of Skywalker's exile, like the ruins of Jedi emblems on Jakku, this is a segment of the galaxy that remains entrapped in the Force, intertwined with eternity. Here, thoughts become voices, terrors become darkness…

Scarlet spears through the water, a perfectly proportioned slash of bloodshine, and Rey realizes that here, internal wars also have a form all too frighteningly real.

She raises her sword. Its steady hum sings through the marrow of her bones, out of sync with her stammering heart. "I don't know what you are," she says, with as much volume as she can muster, "but now I know who I am. And I don't want to be afraid."

A voice without body speaks out of the darkened depths. _So you_ are _afraid,_ it says. It does not sound particularly surprised.

"But you need your fear," Rey says, "to make you strong. All _I_ need are my own two hands and something to fight for."

Silence. It _prickles_ , itching just beneath her skin, threatening an unwelcome metamorphosis. Rey thinks this place could make a Sith Lord kneel and pray, or else a Jedi impale herself on her own sword. This alcove belongs to revelations and perversions alike. Her hands tremble; her whole body trembles, her heart rocking forward against her ribs like a boat cut from its mooring.

A reptilian laugh sounds, deeper than the ocean's maw. _What are you fighting for, Skywalker?_

"My family," Rey says, barely. The words taste like dry bread and heavy sun, and long nights spent alone and waiting.

"You speak of family," says the serpentine voice. "The Master who betrayed you in your hour of need? The mother who never once dried your tears in the desert?" Another laugh. "What family, but mere givers of breath, who branded you with a coward's timeless name before they cast you adrift upon the world?"

The water pressure closes in, renewed, but Rey squares her shoulders, braced firmly against the weight. "The life-debt companion who prepared me for this journey. The princess who held me for twenty minutes before she let me board the Falcon. The smuggler whose voice I hear every time you try to drown it." Her breath hitches when she adds, "The boy who made me promise today was not an end."

She senses that the shadow presence is staring it her. It only lurks; it says nothing.

"I make my own family," Rey says, her voice cresting above any wave, the light of her sword like a beacon in the blackness. "I make my own beginnings." She raises her free hand, balling it into a fist, and the Force blasts forward at her command. "But I'm afraid this is your end."

There is a sort of shriek, like air escaping a sealed docking bay, and then a silence so pure it feels warm on Rey's skin, like sunlight from the realm above. Rey gasps deeply, desperately for air. She is a battered sort of girl, afraid to call a resting place home, reluctant to consider safety a luxury – sooner to consider it a haunt. There are pieces of her so badly bruised that they can only throb when held, and instead find relief in being utterly alone.

The hideous emptiness here is the closest thing she knows to a father's embrace. It is full of the Force, swelled to bursting with the promise of tomorrows.

All at once, light explodes through the water – from where, it's impossible to ascertain – but Rey can clearly see streamers of living shadow, like a Sith Lord's cloak fraying, decaying beneath the surface of this uncharted world. At the heart of the shadow strands lies a single chair, originally designed to rotate, but now hovering in the water, impossibly still, a monument to failed schemes and ugly ambitions. Around the chair, beyond the dark streamers, a battered shell of a chamber somehow remains – like an empire's helmet split open, suffering a fatal blow.

Directly in front of the chair, a silver saber's hilt hovers, unmoving, in the water.

Without stopping to consider the consequences, Rey surges forward and seizes it. Absurdly, despite perhaps decades underwater, she swears the metal is still warm against her palm. Immediately upon reaching her hand, the blade ignites a brilliant, blazing emerald.

 _This was your father's sword,_ says a voice quite unlike those that came before. It is tired, and weary, and has no passion left – only a rotten, rancid certainty. _It was not enough._

Rey feels, distinctly, a skeletal hand upon her throat, closing tightly. But the moment she reaches to grapple with it, the touch is gone. The surrounding light crashes out of being, the voice collapses into quiet, and the skeletal hand is as if it had never been. Guided by the Force, led by azure and emerald lights, Rey forges her way to the surface.

 **4.**

Finn will tell her she looks like a ghost.

She will tell him she heard from several.

She will fall asleep in the cockpit for hours, still underwater, overcome with a weariness beyond words. He will refuse to start the ship for fear of startling her. Her head will rest in the hollow of his throat like a collar: the only obligation he still retains, the first he ever chose.

The fallen emperor's spirit will whisper that Skywalkers have never been enough.

The traitor will cradle her forehead like an allegiance and whisper, gently, while he carefully unbraids her hair, letting it fall unbound across his shoulder, her eyes shut tight.

"They call you Skywalker," he whispers. They are not wrong. "They call you scavenger, soldier, savior," he whispers. They are not wrong. "I'll call you whatever you like," he says, pressing a kiss to her forehead, "if you stay with me."


End file.
